This is going to be another small entry, I’m afraid. Firstly, I should belatedly do the thing where I promote some of the writings I have recently published. I wrote about my trip across Australia for Going Down Swinging, and the first of three pieces can be seen here, the second here. A preview of the latter:
I have often heard people describe a perceived sameness as boring: that sky, roads, and even beautiful countryside can become a blur after a while. I don’t think I’ll ever understand those people. Though we had, over the past three days, been on roads that extended as far as the eye could see, they never failed to leave me stunned, humbled by scale, and thrilled in a way I had never been by a landscape large beyond reckoning. A largeness only literature could hope to map in its entirety, to expose not just the outer lines, the broadness of its body, but to interrogate its features, its tiny miracles and incongruities.
I have a poem in the latest issue of Tincture Journal, which sadly isn’t part of the free content but which you can purchase for $8. I also have a poem in the latest issue of Meanjin.
What’s with all this self-promotion, you might be thinking, where’s the poem by Mary Karr? Well, here’s the thing. County Fair is a goddamn beautiful poem. I love it so very much. But I don’t actually have much to say about it. I’ve read it several times now, and each time, the joy garnered from the reading has only increased the buffer around it. Love is resistant to interrogation that way, at least at first. I have yet to pierce that skin. So, at least for now, I’m going to stay away from trying to pick it apart and continue to enjoy its beautiful evocation of this childhood mainstay, of parenthood, and the beauty and ugliness in all of us.
It begins:
On the mudroad of plodding American bodies,my son wove like an antelope from stallto stall and want to want. I no’ed it all: the wind-upkiller robot and winged alien; kniveshierarchical in a glass case; the blow-up vinyl wolfbobbing from a pilgrim’s staff.
